Sula

Nel Wright and Sula Peace grow up together in the Bottom, a Black neighborhood on a hillside above the fictional Medallion, Ohio, settled generations earlier after a slaveholder tricked a freed man into taking the area's poor hill land by calling it, falsely, the bottom of heaven. Nel comes from a strict, conventional household; Sula grows up in the chaotic home of her grandmother Eva, who once cut off her own leg deliberately for insurance money, and her mother Hannah, who sleeps with the neighborhood's husbands without any apparent guilt about it. As girls the two accidentally cause the drowning death of a younger boy, Chicken Little, swinging him by the hands until he slips from their grip into the river, a secret they never report and never fully discuss again even between themselves. As adults their paths split hard: Nel marries Jude and settles into respectable married life, while Sula leaves town for a decade, returns changed and openly scandalous, and eventually sleeps with Jude, an affair that ends both her friendship with Nel and Nel's marriage in a single stroke. The town brands Sula an outright evil presence and blames her for every misfortune that follows, an accusation that, oddly, gives the community a shared purpose it never had while she was gone. Sula dies alone in 1940, and Nel visits her only near the very end, the two reconciling only partly before Sula dies still insisting that whatever she and Nel once had between them mattered more than any marriage ever could. Twenty five years later, in 1965, Nel visits the elderly Eva in a nursing home, where Eva casually reveals she has always known exactly what happened to Chicken Little, a fact Nel has spent decades avoiding. Walking home afterward past Sula's grave, Nel finally breaks down grieving not for Jude, the husband she lost, but for Sula, the friend, realizing only then how much of her adult life she has spent missing the wrong person entirely.

The novel moves in discrete, year titled sections rather than one continuous narrative, giving it an episodic, almost folkloric quality; a subplot following Shadrack, a shell shocked World War veteran who invents his own private National Suicide Day, reads almost like a freestanding story woven into the larger book. It is short and reads quickly, but asks a reader to hold several generations and timelines in mind at once.